Desig

Teatre

informació obra


Intèrprets:
Laura Conejero, Anna Sahun, Carles Martínez, Raimon Molins
Direcció:
Sílvia Munt
Autoria:
Josep M. Benet i Jornet
Escenografia:
Enric Planas, Mercè Lucchetti
Vestuari:
Míriam Compte
Il·luminació:
Carlos Marquerie, Guillem Gelabert
So:
Jordi Bonet
Ajudantia de direcció:
Tilda Espluga
Sinopsi:

Un text de Josep Maria Benet i Jornet d’atmosfera fantasmagòrica i onírica on el desig n’és el protagonista.

Desig és la inquietant història d’un matrimoni que veu interrompuda la seva vida rutinària. Trucades anònimes i un cotxe que fa llums al costat d’una carretera. La misteriosa connexió amb una parella de desconeguts. Els records d’una nit que gairebé s’havien esborrat.

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L’obra de Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, mitjançant un gran exercici críptic, enterra una història sota un text i sota una trama on, aparentment, no hi passa res. Aquestes traces soterrades són les que motiven a introduir-se en un món on allò que és veritat i allò que és somni, desig, es creuen constantment, o no. Perquè és cert que contínuament estem jugant en un doble univers: allò que ens passa i allò que voldríem que ens passés. El desig arrenca de l’avorriment, el que ens obstinem a amagar, però que existeix amb tossuderia. El desig ens fa caminar, ens fa volar.

Agreixo aquest pas cap a l’abisme que m’ofereix el Papitu. Aquest pas que va fer ell amb valentia el 1989. Aquesta empenta a l’esquena que et fa saltar i et fa ser valent, irremeiablement. Quatre personatges, enmig d’un no-res, que busquen el seu desig...

Crítica: Desig

01/03/2022

A profound disconnect

per Alx Phillips

A woman driving along an isolated rural road is flagged down by a man whose car has broken down. This is the third time she has seen the same man on the same road. This time, however, she stops.

Desig (Desire) is a superb play by Josep Maria Benet i Jornet written in 1989 and immortalised in a 1991 production (and film) directed by a young Sergi Belbel. Here, loneliness in all its manifestations is painfully picked apart, like an explosion/implosion in slow motion.

Born in 1940, Benet i Jornet was an exemplary playwright and screenwriter whose contribution to Catalan theatre in the post-Franco era was paramount. Born in Barcelona, he was inspired by an apparent love of comics (he lived just near Mercat Sant Antoni, where the historic Sunday secondhand book market is still held) and went on to create around 40 texts for theatre. Benet i Jornet died of Covid in 2020, after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2015 saw him placed in care. 

Desig, which won the Serra d'Or literary prize in 1990, is a play about repression and self-censorship, and considered to be one of the author’s more ostentatious works. The shock ending may not be such a shock anymore, but there is absolutely enough here to speak to our pseudo-open age of introspective narcissism, where oversharing emotional trivialities has ballooned into a dangerous form of mass distraction. Even the conspicuous lack of names in the play: ’her’ ‘him’ ‘man’ ‘woman’ seem an invitation to explore slippery gender pronouns. 

This new adaptation directed by Sílvia Munt places the audience on two sides, capturing the claustrophobic vertigo, and perhaps the central provocation of the play. The interpretations, however, seem brittle and frustrated; as if upstaged from the outset by the text. English subtitles happily hovered just above stage right in one performance, exemplifying how, in few words oft repeated, Benet i Jornet lures us into a vivid yet unreliable landscape of isolated individuals in a profound state of disconnect.